It’s hard to believe, but here is a story about an isolated Tibetan village that just wants to be left alone by the outside world, is threatened by vicious predators, but has nothing to do with contemporary politics. The residents are sheep involved in a profitable wool enterprise and the outsiders are grill-toting wolves ready to pounce should the protective Tibetan mastiffs ever let their guard down. The sheep vs. wolf conflict is barely half of Rock Dog's threadbare story; however, for the young mastiff who was born to protect sheep has rock ’n roll in his heart and wants to break out to the big city to follow the music. Boiled down to the recognizable moral of pursue your dream but don’t forget where you come from, Rock Dog is a weak offering in the competitive animated feature film world and a movie even kids built on the foundation of repeat viewings will not beg their parents to start over.

Rock Dog was my four year-old’s first movie in a real movie theater. I was downright bored five minutes in so I could only imagine what we were in for when the kid started to get restless. The savior? He figured out he could fold himself up in the movie theater seat. It’s not specifically the kid’s short attention span that made him look away from Bodi the dog, it’s that Rock Dog is not funny, its pacing is slow, and since no adults were laughing because there are no inside adult jokes to enjoy, none of the children were laughing either. The best thing I can say about Rock Dog is it does not come attached with an irritating “Who let the dogs out?” catchphrase meant to manipulate your kid and take a chunk out of your soul every time you hear it on a commercial or squeezed out of a stuffed animal.

Bodi (Luke Wilson, Concussion) reminds me of Luke Skywalker stuck on Tatoonie staring at the sky. Bodi stares into the sunset too, but instead of starships and aliens, he’s thinking about guitars and rock melodies. Just like Skywalker, Bodi is denied the chance to wander and explore because he has responsibilities at home. Khampa (J.K. Simmons, La La Land) is the town guard and Bodi’s dad. He’s trying to teach his son the ways of the mastiff force, a skill including shooting fireballs out of your palms at invading wolves, but Bodi is too busy plucking a raggedy guitar and jamming to a radio that literally falls out of the sky. Snow Mountain, the idyllic village where the forgetful sheep enjoy their wooly existence, used to be a musical village until Khampa went all Footloose and banned music for fear it would distract from defense and readiness.

There are amusing World War II style posters around town with variations of the ‘loose lips sink ships’ slogan but other than that, the Rock Dog animation lacks a lot of detail opting to only focus on characters. Based on an autobiographical Chinese graphic novel called Tibetan Rock Dog written and illustrated by Zheng Jun, one of China’s first and most popular rock stars, Zheng grew up in Tibet and headed off to the big city after he heard a Springsteen song on the radio. Zheng’s parents wanted him to study international finance, but according to Zheng, once he heard the tunes, it was a cosmic experience. We see Bodi catapult into stars and rainbows as soon as he hears his first rock song too.

The city Bodi heads off to is a Shanghai or Tokyo type megalopolis and he’s searching for Angus Scattergood (Eddie Izzard, The LEGO Batman Movie). Scattergood is a cat with a seen it all British accent who continuously churns out chart toppers. Wanting guitar and life lessons from the best there is, Rock Dog spends an inordinate amount of time watching Bodi try and infiltrate Scattergood’s booby-trapped front gate and hedge maze. The ‘jokes’ include things like electricity zapping, springboard launching, and roving mechanical mice guards. The city is also home to the wolves, led by Linnux (Lewis Black, Inside Out). Linnux orders Bodi kidnapped so he can interrogate him and learn how to get to those delicious sheep. It’s never too early to teach kids the bad guys are always hanging out in poorly lit clubs in the big, bad city waiting to pounce on gullible outsiders.

Rock Dog is built for the real little ones as the material is spoon fed and the animation is rustic, even for a the mini-budget allotted to director Ash Brannon. Brannon has some Pixar credentials as he was one of three co-directors on Toy Story 2 and also co-directed 2007’s Surf’s Up. You can tell Brannon had some roadblocks with the script as there are seven folks credited with ‘Additional Story Material’. I can’t even imagine what Rock Dog looked like before seven people added additional story ideas to it. One of the very few half-smile bits is the narrator called Fleetwood Yak (Sam Elliott, The Good Dinosaur). Elliott pulls very similar duty to his outside observations in The Big Lebowski; he tells us there is a young mastiff out there with a different dream in his heart. I can only imagine if there was an eighth script writer out there, they may have turned Rock Dog in a different, and more watchable kids’ movie.